As a business leader, you need passion to motivate your clientes and your team

Finding your passions as a leader and learning ways how to cultivate them in your organisation is critical to running a high-performing business. Any business, more specifically a start-up venture, is a gamble but if your business idea is one that can potentially be profitable, then having an innate passion for what you do will make the difference between success and failure.

Just hearing the words “the most interesting man in the world,” takes your thoughts to Dos Equis beer.

Those commercials are iconic. They make you laugh. They’re quotable. Every commercial is more like a television episode than a brand advertisement.

The “Most Interesting Man” is easily in the top handful of successful campaigns of the last decade. Students of advertising would know, however, that they are not 100% original. The Dos Equis man was in fact inspired by an ad campaign 50 years its predecessor. I am of course speaking of David Ogilvy’s “The Man in the Hathaway Shirt” campaign.

For those who do not know, David Ogilvy is widely considered "The Father of Advertising" with Time Magazine once calling him "the most sought-after wizard in today's advertising industry.”

It´s a fun tool used to gather artistic inspiration comes to mind when you are on the right track. If you picture some sort of hybrid weegie board, you might be a little further from the mark…

Whatever your impression of a mood board might be, it is something you should get to know and love. Making one can be quite fun all in its own, and designing/building/creating anything in a team without one can lead your projects down a serious path of misdirection.

A mood board is an assortment of images, textures, colors, and fonts all arranged together and used to define the overall style or ‘mood’ of your project.

Why You Need One

If you create things for a living then I’m sure you already use cool stuff you’ve seen as an inspiration. A mood board is simply a more polished, cohesive collection of those cool things.

They are used all across the board (maybe pun intended). Creatives working in design, branding, photography, fashion, film, interior decorating and even wedding planning all use mood boards.

If your work is for a client, then assembling a mood board together is how you let him or she get involved in the design process without them sticking a nose in trying to play art director.

It is how you guarantee that you are all on the ‘same page’ with the direction of the project.

You know that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you present a beautifully-designed piece of work only to have it unapologetically rejected because it didn’t have the right ‘feel’. Agreeing ahead of time on the elements in the mood board and having your client contribute images they like is how you all are in agreement of what that ‘feel’ should be.

How To Make One

There really isn’t a definitive structure for making a ‘correct’ mood board.

Usually, the elements are arranged in some sort of fashion collage. Whether they are strictly aligned to a grid or more loosely placed is dependent on your own style.

Too many beginner designers are under the assumption that all the ‘magic’ happens at the computer. They move into Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop way to quickly, and sit and stare at their screens hoping that some inspiration pops out at them from the pixels.

In reality, this rarely happens (if at all). Even the ‘simplest’ designs were imagined through a highly structured, multi-step process. Seasoned designers frequently go through tens and maybe hundreds of ideas and raw sketches before they narrow down to the final few ‘workable’ concepts.

These raw ideas are all generated through brainstorming.

The old adage goes, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” There’s definitely more than one way to spark creativity as well. David Sherwin shares many beneficial brainstorming techniques in his book Creative Workshop. Try out one (or more) of these exercises and see what ideas you come up with that you wouldn’t necessarily have thought of before.

Mind Mapping

This brainstorming method lets you identify a range of ideas quickly in a free-form manner.1. In the center of your page, write the key points of focus for your brainstorm. 2. Radiating outward, jot down any related words, concepts, ideas, and even opposites. 3. Expand upon and circle relationships in the ideas that emerge. 4. Extract the big ideas and start to sketch out possible design executions.

Word Listing

Similar to mind mapping, word listing has a bit more structure and can sometimes yield quicker results.

Draw out three columns on a sheet of paper. In the first column, write out as many words or concepts related to the focus point of your design.

In the second column, pick an idea from the first column that interests you, and write down a series of related words.

In the third column, write down words that are opposite of the idea you chose from column one.

Circle and connect relationships that span the three columns. Extract the big ideas and start to sketch out possible design executions.

About Us

Bloominari is a San Diego based, full-service digital marketing and creative design agency dedicated to providing small businesses with solutions to increase their customer base and grow their brands and companies online.

Our team has the creative ideas, the ambitious drive and the know-how that only comes with more than a decade of experience.